Bristol Brewers

Do you happen to know if the pH test kits read down to the 5.2-5.6 range? I think most aquariums are more like pH 7-9, so just wanted to make sure that such kits would be suited to brewing. It'd be really cool to see if the mash pH one ends up with is actually close to predictions.

This thinking about water has me wanting to see what my mash pH is, as well as verify whether the Bristol Water report available online accurately reflects what actually comes out of the tap. Anyone happen to have a pH meter I could borrow, and/or an alkalinity test kit?

-Eric

I seem to never fully attenuate my beers. Looking for ways to improve the situation, and thought of that. Obviously it helps when i'm making the starter, why not when I'm making my actual beer. What sort of apparent attenuation figures are you getting? I typically get ~80% mashing at 68 degC or low...

Aww yeah, and exbeeriment! That was a good read, thanks for mentioning it as I hadn't seen it before. And good point about acids also contributing ions. Ariel and I use AMS (aka CRS) in our paler ales, which is apparently a mix of hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sulphuric acid (H2SO4). I suppose we're a...

Heya all, As part of my daily dose of work procrastination, I've been reading a bit about how various ions can affect the taste of beer. The main points I read about seem to be: Sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl-) ions give an impression of malty full-bodiedness. Sulphate (SO4 2-) ions give an impressio...

Ariel and I are both in. We're happy to supply or help make food of any sort.

Ah, that's a neat trick! Saves you the trouble of trying to tighten a nut that's buried in a socket of insulation.

It might be best to clamp just on the outer skin as Roger suggests. Reason being that if you're clamping through the whole thickness of insulation, you're relying on the insulation to bear the compressive load between the nut and shank flange. The insulation might yield to this load, if not right aw...

Sure thing. Here's my brew notes, augmented with some recently-added commentary: "Strike water added to yield a 44C mash for 15m. Pulled 1/3 of volume for decoction, which was raised to 68C for 15m in a big pot on my stove, then boiled for 10m. The idea here was to convert those sugars before t...